The Guardians (30 page)

Back when la Winnie was born on that onion farm, I remember all the puppies that had been crushed by the mother. By accident. But still. Six of them. I helped the farmer and his wife gather them up because the mother was so protective; she was baring her teeth at us. She tried to take a bite out of the farmer's hand, too. While the mother was busy wanting to attack her master, I slipped the dead newborn pups out from under her. They were so small. Their ojitos still shut. They never even got to see light or taste milk. She just crushed them, by accident, like I said. “Here, we'll just put them in this,” the farmer's wife said, bringing over a sack, the kind they used for the onions. She brought her husband the first-aid kit, too.

But he kept saying, “I'm all right. Don't worry about me, now. Everything will be just fine.”

Driving on the I-io east toward Tornillo, where el Abuelo Milton told me on the phone that they were headed, I kept saying to myself, “I'll be all right. We'll all be just fine.” I said it like a rosary, over and over. But I kept remembering that onion farmer, for some reason. Gabo's dog. I picked out la Winnie right away when I came back a few weeks later. She was the más metiche of the litter, getting in todo. She'll make a good watchdog, I said to myself. I was right, too.

I wasn't wrong that day, neither, driving above the speed limit, trying to catch up to Gabo, who was in el cura's car with Miguel and that hoodlum. What were they thinking? I asked myself. What were they thinking? I was driving as fast as I could. I won't say I was driving as fast as I could
without getting a ticket because, before I knew it, the state police was on my tail. But it wasn't just any state police. It was la Diputada Sofia, the chief deputy who had arrested Gabo. The very same one who was involved in his case. And it wasn't a coincidence, neither, that she was right behind me. She made me pull the truck off the road and get in her car to ride with her and a deputy. I had to sit in back like I was a hoodlum myself. “It's the law, sorry,” she said. She'd got a call from el abuelo herself. “This is too dangerous,” she shouted over her shoulder, driving with the siren on y todo, “Your nephew and friends should have just called us.”

La diputada was radioing in for help. We were on our way to make a premature bust. She already knew where we were headed. The house in Tornillo, close to the border, was used by the same coyotes who lived in the green house in El Paso. La diputada knew all this. She knew all kinds of things. Their names. Their expanding criminal enterprises. “Why didn't you tell us?” I asked her, pushing myself forward on the seat and shrinking back when she nearly sideswiped an eighteen-wheeler we went around. We now had another state police car right behind us. A few minutes later, there were three.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” she said. We had never met before. She looked like she might be a little older than me but la diputada moved like one of Charlie's Angels. “We couldn't tell you. We were planning a sting on these people—here and on their house in El Paso.”

“My sobrino has a gun,” I told her.

For a split second she turned and looked at me and then kept driving at full speed.

“Kids,” her deputy said. “They're all alike at that age… .”

“My nephew's not just any kid,” I said, sounding like everyone talking about their kids.

“No, not all kids are the same,” la Diputada Sofia reprimanded the deputy, who said nothing after that the whole ride. Riding, riding. Sirens going. Day turning to dusk and suddenly to black night like a blanket thrown over our heads.

“We'll catch up,” la diputada said. She didn't sound too sure. She just put her foot way down on the gas pedal until we couldn't go no faster.

You can't catch up from down in the canyon, I thought. She had lived there, too. You could see it in her eyes. In her “aura,” like Uriel would have said. She was someone like me. We get to witness a whole lot of things before it's our time. Things people wouldn't believe. You just say
barbaridades like, “Don't worry. We'll catch up,” like she kept saying, speeding down the road.

We never caught up to el cura's car. We never even spotted it. I don't blame the priest for nothing. He probably wasn't even speeding, knowing him. They just had too much of a head start. They were flying. We were still on the ground. But my boy, he was flying.

MIGUEL

I gave away most of the colonel's money. Not all at once, but over the years. The only times I got involved in conventional politics was when I made donations to the Gore campaign and later to Kerry's—just to be let down twice. I always give to Amnesty International and to Human Rights Watch, all the usual old lefty favorites. But at some point you ask yourself, How much can you do to absolve yourself from the sins of the father? I've put aside for the kids’ college funds. The house is in their names, just in case I get terminally ill and want to give up to my last dime to the Mother Teresa charity in hopes of saving my soul. I'll pay for Crucita's recovery. After that, Jesus will have to look out for her.

My abuelo asked me if I'd take him to the pretrial hearings. Regina's there, too, of course. I watch her across the courtroom, in her homemade blue suit, those ravishing legs of hers crossed so primly at the ankles. She stares straight ahead. Redhead still doesn't talk to me. I don't blame her. There are times when I can't stand myself, either. But I'm working on it, back in counseling with a new therapist. I think this one gets not just my hang-ups but the whole hard-ass cultural baggage crap I lug around. Who knows? Maybe it is all just me. All I know is that it will be one long, lonely life if I don't ever get that woman back.

I saw the coyote and his woman there. Tiny Tears identified them. She said she first saw him in front of his house the time she went with Gabe, Jesse, and El Toro. She stated he was so busy hollering at someone on a cell phone that she was able to get in his house without his noticing. Tiny Tears herself is looking at doing some serious time.

As a witness I'll make sure of that.

We found El Toro in that house in Tornillo. He was so messed up on drugs—heroin, meth, snot, who knows what, how much and, most of all, who cares—if the cops had not arrested him that night, he'd be dead now. Instead, they rehabbed his ass so he could rat on the Villanuevas. Because he is such a brownnose the D.A. says he'll probably get some time off for it. One day la rata will be back out on the streets.

When we first pulled up to the house in Tornillo, that stoned punk ass Jesse jumped out. “Come on, come on,” he said. When we hesitated to get out of the priest's car, he said, “Don't worry, man. The boss ain't here.”

“You mean El Toro?” J.B. asked, still in the car. The three of us didn't move, even when Jesse was halfway to the front door. “Naw, man,” the gangbanger said. “El Toro ain't the boss around here. I'm talkin’ about
the
boss. The one that looks kinda like you… .” He pointed at my ponytail and started laughing. I figured he had to be talking about the coyote back in El Paso, the same one Regina and I met up with the first time we went to el Segundo barrio.

While I didn't own a gun and my grandfather couldn't persuade me to take his, I did accept his switchblade. At least I could defend myself if need be, I thought. More out of desperation than bravery, we followed the crazy dude past the unlocked door. We were out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

As soon as you got inside you sensed something nasty was going on in that place. The unthinkable. It wasn't just a meth or crack house. It reeked like bad fish. After our eyes got adjusted to the dark, we realized there were two naked girls flopped on a run-down couch. The shades were drawn so what little light there still was for the moment didn't help much. “Put a lamp on,” the priest ordered with the authority he was accustomed to having, I guessed. Someone flipped a switch. It was Gabe. We saw right away that one of the girls was Crucita. At first I feared she wasn't alive.

“Oh my God,” I said under my breath, rushing over to her, feeling for a pulse, a heartbeat, patting her face to revive her.

After that, everything happened so fast, no matter how many times I try to reconstruct it all, for the cops, for my own sake, for the sake of ever-elusive justice, there are still blanks. There will always be blanks in my recollection of Wonderland.

In that den of iniquity that evening, Gabe and the priest found El
Toro sprawled out on a bed in one of the two bedrooms. But the amoeba was unconscious. “He's in there,” Gabe said breathlessly.

Crucita was mostly out of it, but she still feebly tried to fight me off as I gathered her up in my arms. She didn't know who I was. She didn't know who she was.

Then we recognized the other girl. It was Tiny Tears. She was slumped, her body all contorted, her eyes open. “What are you doing here?” she asked us. Maybe she didn't know who she was talking to, like she claims. Like the defense attorney insists.

The kid started to go to her.

“Gabo,” the priest said to stop him, like maybe he thought she was possessed. She looked possessed. That twisted face of hers chilled me to the bone. The kid only wanted to save her, the girl with the tattooed tears. He tried to lift her, just as I had lifted Crucita. “Let go of me,” Tiny Tears said. “Leave me the fuck alone, asshole.” So he backed off. He left her the fuck alone. What else did she want?

Maybe she knew it was the kid or maybe, like she says now in court, she didn't know. She was too out of it, her lawyer insists.

All the while Jesse was laughing como un pendejo. But he didn't get in my way as I carried Crucita toward the door. By then it was pitch-dark out and we heard all the sirens outside. “Let's go,” the priest said.

REGINA

My mamá always thought I wasn't really cut out for much. I know that. Her son Gabriel, yeah. And little Rafael. “He could have done so much with his life.” My mother lamented his decisions all the time. “Rafa's got a mind for mathematics. He's got a good hand for drafting. He could have done anything he wanted … but you, hija,” she always said, without finishing, and then she'd laugh a little laugh. Just enough to make me feel like she was sitting on my chest.

Rafa had been dead about a week, the coroner said, when the police found his body. He was in la coyota's house in el Segundo barrio all that time. They discovered my brother's corpse the same night we were out in Tornillo. The police went to the coyotes’ in El Paso. They were planning a raid all along. But with us going out to the other place, they had to make their bust right then. The coyotes had my brother making methamphetamine. He didn't die by accident. From mixing up chemicals, I mean. He died because they wanted him to die. Rafa's body showed signs of being repeatedly zapped with a Taser gun. They kept him locked in un cuartito, no bigger than a walk-in closet. They had him naked, too. But besides that, la diputada said, “even with an autopsy we'll probably never really know what was the actual cause of his death or why they kept him captive. Sociopaths don't use logic. They only think they do.”

We were on our way to the coroner's so that I could identify the body. I knew it was him. The man they found had a heart tattoo over his heart. When we got to the coroner's, walking down the hall that smelled of Pine-Sol, it seemed the hall kept getting longer and longer. Walking, walking. Then we got to the room where they had my brother.

“CALL ME,
”el Abuelo Milton had said on the phone.
“I'LL GO WITH YOU.
”But I didn't. There are just some things you must do alone. Facing death is one of them. A young woman in a white lab coat went in with me and la diputada. She pulled the sábana back from my brother's face. He'll always be my brother. He'll always be Rafa, who could have been a great math teacher, a revolutionary leader, a farmer, whatever he wanted. Whatever he wanted? Was that fair to say? Maybe not about a dead man.

El Abuelo Milton thought seeing Rafa dead would be too difficult. But no, the worst part was over, the not knowing, fearing that something horrible was happening or may have happened to mi hermanito. Now, another kind of difficulty started. This would be the feeling of having been helpless to stop it.
Helpless
is not a word I like to use in relation to myself. But there it was, like my little brother's body in front of me. Maybe it wasn't even him. It could have been any undocumented man caught up in the evils of border crossings. I pushed the sheet down to check for the tattoo. I traced it with my finger, for a moment wanting to pinch the flesh. Wake up, Rafa, I wanted to say. Let's go home.